Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Tonight, HBO is premiering a new episode of its State of Play series on sports. This new installment is called "Trophy Kids" and its focus is the tendency among some parents — in this case, the parents of student-athletes — to live vicariously through their children. Here's a teaser-trailer:

Of course, the phenomenon of parental overinvolvement and inappropriate emotional investment isn't limited to sports and athletics. It can happen with just about any childhood activity or hobby — from schoolwork to scouting, from music to beauty pageants (Toddlers and Tiaras, anyone?). The anecdotal stories can be astonishing; it would be interesting to see what psychologists, therapists, and social scientists have had to say about this.

All of which brings to mind the debates over human cloning. Way back in 2010, we here at Futurisms tussled with a few other bloggers about the ethics of cloning. We were disturbed, among other things, by the way that cloning advocates blithely want to remake procreation, parenthood, and the relationship between the generations. As the phenomenon depicted in this HBO program suggests, many parents already have a strong desire to treat their children's childhoods as opportunities to relive, perfect, or redeem their own. Imagine how much more powerful that desire would be if the children in question were clones — willfully created genetic copies.

In its 2002 report Human Cloning and Human Dignity, the President's Council on Bioethics attempted to think about procreation and cloning in part by contrasting two ways of thinking about children — as "gifts" or as "products of our will":

Gifts and blessings we learn to accept as gratefully as we can. Products of our wills we try to shape in accord with our desires. Procreation as traditionally understood invites acceptance, rather than reshaping, engineering, or designing the next generation. It invites us to accept limits to our control over the next generation. It invites us even — to put the point most strongly — to think of the child as one who is not simply our own, our possession. Certainly, it invites us to remember that the child does not exist simply for the happiness or fulfillment of the parents.

To be sure, parents do and must try to form and mold their children in various ways as they inure them to the demands of family life, prepare them for adulthood, and initiate them into the human community. But, even then, it is only our sense that these children are not our possessions that makes such parental nurture — which always threatens not to nourish but to stifle the child — safe.

This concern can be expressed not only in language about the relation between the generations but also in the language of equality. The things we make are not just like ourselves; they are the products of our wills, and their point and purpose are ours to determine. But a begotten child comes into the world just as its parents once did, and is therefore their equal in dignity and humanity.

The character of sexual procreation shapes the lives of children as well as parents. By giving rise to genetically new individuals, sexual reproduction imbues all human beings with a sense of individual identity and of occupying a place in this world that has never belonged to another. Our novel genetic identity symbolizes and foreshadows the unique, never-to-be-repeated character of each human life. At the same time, our emergence from the union of two individuals, themselves conceived and generated as we were, locates us immediately in a network of relation and natural affection.

As that section of the report concludes, it is clear that the nature of human procreation affects human life "in endless subtle ways." The advocates of cloning show very little appreciation for the complexity of the relations they wish to transform.